In this day and age, almost all businesses need to have a strong online presence. The first step towards that is launching a company website. This is where a lot of people make the mistake of choosing any random web hosting service. To be honest, the market is flooded with web hosting companies who try to lure in customers by offering cheap and often free services. However, if your decision of picking a web hosting service is solely based on cheaper cost, then you are simply not thinking ahead. Instead, you should choose the best web hosting now so that your website gets the proper platform to grow in the future. Helping you take an informed decision, here’s our list of 4 things you need to do before picking a web host.

Understand Your Need: The first thing you need to do is understand what you want from your website and draw up a plan for the future. If you are opening a website just for the fun of it, then you can probably go for any of the free hosting services. However, if you plan to sell products and services directly through your website, then it’s best to find a reputed host.

Investigate Up Time: Web hosting companies proudly feature their uptime percentages on their official websites. Even though you should ideally go for hosts that have the best percentage, you should never trust a service claiming to have 100% uptime. This is because maintaining a 100% uptime is impossible, and even the best and the most expensive web hosting services experience technical issues and downtimes.

Consider Scalability: There are a lot of free web hosting services who simply do not have the capability to host a corporate website. To make matters worse a lot of them create unnecessary complications when you want to switch you site to another host. This is why it’s best to pick a reputed service that have a long history of hosting giant corporate websites. It’s important to remember that it’s always easier to opt for a cheap package and upgrade it later to suit your websites growing needs than to switch web hosting companies.

Check Quality Of The Technical Support: It’s unrealistic to expect that your website is never going to face downtimes or technical issues. What you ideally should look at is a web hosting service that has a great technical support team. The tech support should not only be well equipped but also have quick response time. The best way to find that out is by reading reviews. Hosts with a good technical support history should have relatively less negative reviews and complaints. It’s best to stay clear of services that do not have a dedicated tech support team and only offer support through online forums.